Fiscal Zero Day

Response from Will, July 1 AM

Truth is I don’t know much more than you do, reading the newspapers, about the progress of this conference committee.

One thing I do have a little perspective on is the difficulty of the job that the conferees are doing. Getting every detail right in a document as big as the state budget, which includes not only hundreds of specific money decisions, but hundreds of legal and policy decisions is hard. Getting that job done in a negotiation among people with differing views is really very hard and intrinsically time consuming.

It is all especially hard this year, because the conferees have less money to work with than when they started the process, as revenue projections have gone down, so they have to disappoint a lot of legislators and constituents.

It doesn’t surprise me or bother me that the job is taking a while. We passed an interim budget to keep things working. This is not a government shutdown situation.